Godzilla review - Nintendo Entertainment System

Look at the box for Godzilla and it seems very tempting - there are lots of huge, colourful sprites in glorious detail in the screenshots and the promise of much fire-breathing malarkey. However, these expectations are cut painfully short within minutes of play. The strategy element seems great but ultimately it doesn't make any difference to the game. The main problem is that your monsters are too big, it's impossible to dodge most of the shots on the scrolling levels, and survival is merely a matter of finding enough life-ups to sustain you. Combat with the enemy monsters has little skill involved, once again because there is so little room to manoeuvre. Playing as Mothra is even worse since every time you are hit you are repelled to the bottom corner of the screen, making it all too easy to become inescapably trapped by a gun emplacement which keeps on hitting you until you die. The graphics don't even live up to the promise of the static screen shots - there's a real slowdown problem whenever the screen gets halfway full and a lot of sprite flicker too. Give it a miss.

I like all the crappy cheesiness of the Godzilla films - they're a great laugh, which is more than can be said about this sad effort. The potential of a veritable monsterbrawl fest has been sadly lost in a sea of slow, flickery graphics and awkward gameplay. The Godzilla sprite is just too large to do anything except take damage from the myriad of gun emplacements and stuff, and instead of humungous combat you end up struggling to get to the next energy icon. The one-on-one combat sequences are more fun, but at the end of the day this simply hasn't got what it takes to make it an enjoyable and worthwhile game.